This is a prelude to a new IPCC report. It’s an exercise in mixing problems that do exist, like biofuels using too much land, with ones that don’t, like excess trace gases in the atmosphere. The end product is the usual alarm-and-confusion brand of propaganda for man-made warming believers, with wild talk of meltdowns, deadly extremes and so forth. More like a Hollywood script than anything resembling reality – but over-the-top stuff like this seems to be standard fare in much of the media nowadays.
The overlapping crises of climate change, mass species extinction, and an unsustainable global food system are on a collision course towards what might best be called an ecological land grab, says Phys.org.
Coping with each of these problems will require a different way of using of Earth’s lands, and as experts crunch the numbers it is becoming unnervingly clear that there may not be enough terra firma to go around.
A world of narrowing options threatens to pit biofuels, forests and food production against each other.
Experts who once touted “win-win” scenarios for the environment now talk about “trade-offs”.
This looming clash is front-and-centre in the most comprehensive scientific assessment ever compiled of how global warming and land use interact, to be released by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Thursday
Proposals to convert areas the size of India and the United States to biofuel crops or CO2-absorbing trees, for example, “could compromise sustainable development with increased risks—and potentially irreversible consequences—for food security, desertification and land degradation,” a draft summary of the 1,000-page report warns.
Meanwhile, the fundamental drivers of Earth’s environmental meltdown—CO2 and methane emissions, nitrogen and plastics pollution, human population, unbridled consumption—continue to expand at record rates, further reducing our margin for manoeuvre.
Case in point: to have at least a 50/50 chance of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) -– the temperature guardrail laid down in a landmark IPCC report last year -– civilisation must be “carbon neutral” within three decades.
Earth’s surface temperature has already risen one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, enough to trigger deadly extreme weather and sea level rise that could swamp coastal megacities by 2100.
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
August 5, 2019 at 03:39AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.
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